It is not yet too late to get started on investing in real estate. Take for example my guest today. William Morales got into real estate investing at the age of 55. In this episode, he shares with me his investing journey, why he chose to get into seller financing, and his plans moving forward.
William realized that his retirement wouldn’t get him anywhere. Looking at it, he’d have to work another 20-25 years and that scared the hell out of him.
His jump into real estate investing didn’t give results at the beginning. For 8-10 years, he was all over the place because he wanted to do everything. Things finally clicked in September 2017 after he saw a video by Mitch Stephen on “The Art of Owner Financing.”
Since then, he’d decided that that was what he would do.
William went into Realtor.com and picked a property in Pittsburg. He looked for properties priced at $50,000 and under and chose the zip code 15210.
He knew he chose a good area because he called around some property managers and asked them if they’d be willing to manage a property in that area. They said that they’d agree to do so.
William found a foreclosed and bank-owned property put up at $27,000. It had been in the market for 90-100 days by that time. He made an offer of $8,000 knowing they’d refuse, which they did.
But after two weeks, the realtor asked him if his offer still stands. So the sale went through and William wired the money.
After buying the property, William told the realtor that he needed a buyer. He put the property back on the market for $27,000 and was looking for someone with a FICO score between 650-700. Within two weeks, the realtor found a tenant-buyer who paid 10% as a down payment.
William found a loan servicing company and used the title company recommended by the realtor. The tenant-buyer went through a credit repair mortgage. William gets $342.07 per month with $35 going to the loan servicing company as a fee. So William cashflows at $307.07 per month.
It’s been like that for the last 4 years.
It took 10 years before William finally found his niche. He was dealing with shiny object syndrome and often ended up wanting to try everything.
But things eventually settled into place once he decided on seller financing. The truth is there’s only so much you can learn while researching. At the end of the day, you have to have the faith to pull the trigger.
Seller financing lets the buyer own it outright and avoid the bank.
For William, he likes never having to worry about maintenance issues and having people call him at night.
It took a while for William to buy his second property. He had gotten lazy and complacent. It was three years later in 2020 before he bought his second one.
William found it on Zillow listed as for sale by the owner. It had been on the market for 30-45 days by then. The seller was a retired, older gentleman asking for $275,000.
William gave the seller all his assurances. He even had to show his 403 to prove that he had the funds. The seller agreed on William’s terms. The term was for 3 years of $1,600 a month. William would take care of all repairs and maintenance.
The next step was for the realtor to find a tenant-buyer. William already had a credit repair company and title company that he would use. He bought that property for $270,000 and sold it for $285,000.
The tenant-buyer entered into a 2-year term with 10% down payment. Monthly payments were $1750. William revealed that he’d been saving the down payment and monthly payments he’d been receiving and hasn’t touched a cent.
William is seeing a softening in the market. He’d been reaching out to 2-5 sellers a day, and looking for properties for rent by owners and for sale by owners through Zillow.
In this market, everyone wants to get out and cash out within 30-45 days. The market has been tough as sellers get lots of offers.
William is the host of his own real estate podcast, Peer 2 Peer Real Estate. What’s interesting about it is that he started it before he bought his first property. His rationale was that since he owns real estate stocks, technically, he owns a piece of the business.
He started the podcast in January 2017 as a way to network. He also learned about seller financing after interviewing three people. The podcast helped him learn a lot from his guests. From how to save thousands of dollars a year by hiring a handyman instead of a property manager to search engine optimization, his guests imparted their knowledge to William for free.
William still works his full-time job at a hospital in New York City. He finds his job stifling, and he finds it difficult to do anything else until he gets home. But he still makes it a point to spend two hours a day on real estate on the weekdays and four hours a day on the weekends.
His goal is to generate more passive income streams for him as he plans to retire next year around June/July.
Pick one niche and stay with it. Not choosing anything will take out most of your time, and you will not achieve anything
Keep working more and more and you’ll find that you get more contacts and start doing better with your strategy.
Clint Coons is one of the founders of Anderson Business Advisors, a firm that specializes in creating asset protection entities…
Justin is a real estate investor who has done almost 2000 deals across the nation and in this episode, he’ll…
David is a real estate investor and a real estate coach. He has been investing in properties for almost 20…
Andrew, a real estate investment developer, is the owner of IronGall Investments, an Austin, Texas-based real estate development company. They…
Chris is the President and CEO of Smart Growth Inc., a California-based real estate and development firm. They are focused…
Rafael is a real estate coach and an organizational psychologist based in Miracle Valley, Arizona. He owns several real estate…